Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment, other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on the way you look at it, I suppose.

There is a Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) hiding somewhere in most of the AI apps. RAG is still all the RAGe – it even has its own Wikipedia page now! I’m not sure if anyone is tracking how fast a term reaches the point where it gets its own Wiki page but RAG must be somewhere near the top of the charts.

Intro

Last week I was catching up with one of my best mates after a long while. He is a well-recognised industry expert who also runs a successful cybersecurity consultancy. Though we had a lot of other things to catch up on, inevitably, our conversation led to AI, LLMs and their (cyber)security implications.

I’ve spent the last couple of months working for early-stage startups building LLM (Large Language Model) apps, as well as hacking on various silly side projects which involved interacting with LLMs in one way or another. But only now I’m starting to realize how naive some of the apps I have helped to build were from the security [and safety] point of view.

I have been aware of Cuelang (CUE) pretty much since the early stages of its development. It always seemed to me the language had the potential to solve a lot of problems in the ocean of YAML which we found ourselves drowning in the Cloud Native ecosystem.

CUE excels in validating data against strictly defined schemas and is equally capable of generating code for data models from them. These are wonderful features, though I hadn’t found the perfect application for them in any of the projects I had been working on. That changed recently with my increased involvement in projects utilizing Large Language Models (LLM)s.

It all started as a joke. I was in a group chat with a few of my friends and we were talking about football (soccer for the American readers). I entered the chat during a mildly heated discussion about the manager of a team one of my friends supports. It was going on for a bit while with seemingly no end in sight when it occurred to me that I could just as well clone my friends’ voices and pit them against each other by backing them with LLMs, and I’d probably not see much difference in the conversation.